The concluding part of this series is all about what real analytics is and its benefit.

This entire series has stressed the different aspects of employing an analytics tool in the network for getting the full benefit of the investment made on networking infrastructure.

In the lastcouple of posts in this series, Dashboards and Reports were explained and there are a whole lot of tools out there in the market that can perform this function with great ease. What makes a difference is the ability to intelligently interpret details that are not directly present in these reports based on information that is already available. It involves a certain amount of intelligence to analyze existing data and apply that idea to predict future behavior.

A simple scenario in this case would be to analyze traffic patterns over a period of time and based on that, the tool needs to give pointers on future behavior. The ‘Capacity Planning reports’ generated by NetFlow Analyzer is an example of reports from an analytics tool. Data patterns over a period of time is analyzed and based on that the future bandwidth requirements are assessed. This saves a lot of resources in terms of money, time and effort that would otherwise need to be separately allocated to perform this assessment.

Another classic example is the Advanced Security Analytics module of NetFlow Analyzer that does network behavioral analysis in order to alert the IT administrator of possible network threats. Only an intelligent analytics tool can perform such activities. A Dashboarding/Reporting tool has the limitation of not being able to provide such valuable insights from existing data. To cap it, a majority of such reporting tools are highly priced despite these limitations.

As an IT administrator, you will need to ensure that you pick the tool that offers maximum return for the investment that you make. An analytics tools is always a smart choice as against a dashboarding tool.

With the power of analytics, you could greatly boost your RoI and get the best bang for your buck. It not only ensures productive usage of network resources but also ensures that your network is far from threats looming around it from every direction. Leverage the power of analytics and derive maximum benefit.